Fall From Grace

It's a long fall from "Highest Paid Player in the NFL" to "Inmate Hoping to Get a Job in Construction," but that's exactly how far former Atlanta Falcon Michael Vick has fallen.

And I have to say, in some ways I feel sorry for the guy. He was handed the world on a platter when he was very young, immature, and not ready for it, and he's paying the price now. He needed someone to mentor him along. Maybe the NFL needs an official mentoring program, where the older, better adjusted players could help the younger players along, talk to them about handling the press, handling the fame, saving money because there's only one Jerry Rice and they're most likely NOT going to still be playing in their forties. Talk about how to handle the off season, how to handle the press. For players like Vick, they could talk about how to surround themselves with the right kinds of people, people who aren't going to get them in jail for two years.

Sounds like a great idea, but the problem, of course, is that there's no way there are enough well adjusted players to be mentors. Would Randy Moss make a good mentor? Or Chad Ocho Cinco?

I think that would actually be humorous. I could see Chad's advice now: "The first thing you need to work on," he'd tell the rookie, "is how to do your touchdown dance, what kind of props to use! Later we'll talk about outrageous ways you can get a fine so that you can stay in the media's mind even if your performance is lacking!"

A Good Laugh

Yesterday was April Fools Day, of course. I only had two attempts to fool me yesterday, one which succeeded and one which failed miserably. However, it was the miserable failure that made me laugh out loud.

As I was walking through the hallways at one of the elementary schools a young girl, maybe 3rd grade, pointed at the ground and said, "Watch out for that!" I glanced down and she laughed. "Ha ha! April Fools!"

I laughed, too, and said, "You got me all right!" But my laughter was forced. It's not that I mind getting tricked. It's just that I didn't think that particularly funny.

A few minutes later, though, I was working on a printer that was requiring me to sit and wait and wait and wait (I don't usually get out to do these kind of workorders, but my tech is seriously overworked right now, so I've been helping her out when I can) and I got on my cell phone's web browser and went to Google's mobile web page. And that's when I saw a link for "New! Google Brain Search." I laughed out loud.

Every year Google puts a couple of practical jokes on its site on April Fools Day, and I spotted this one right away. Still, I downloaded the application to my phone, and it's quite funny. Google's Brain Search uses the power of Google to access your brain's memory. Just start the program and hold your cell phone up to your forehead! It will use a special "psycho-neural matrix radiating 3cm beyond your brain" to read your mind and answer all of those questions you were thinking, like "When is my wife's birthday anyway?" and "That guy's cute. Should I walk over and introduce myself?" The answers are always funny.

I may have ruined some of the humor by telling your it's fake, but come on! Who's stupid enough to have believed it anyway? Here's the link if you want to check it out yourself: http://www.google.com/mobile/default/brainsearch.html. It works on iPhones, Blackberries, and Windows Mobile phones.

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UPDATE AT 7:43 AM: Darn it! I just clicked on the link above and found that the website is gone. And when I looked on my mobile phone I see that the application has uninstalled itself! So I guess it really was an April Fool's joke on me, after all! But I swear I didn't make the above up. You can read about it by clicking this link.

Goodbye, Encarta

I learned yesterday that, later this year, Microsoft will cease to produce the Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia products. The digital encyclopedia all but killed the print encyclopedia, and now it is being killed itself by the Internet.

The Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia was first produced in 1993, and at the time it was a stand-alone CD product only. But it was cool. I first used it in 1995, and I was blown away by the possibility. Here was an encyclopedia where you could jump from topic to topic in an instant, without having to put one book away and get out another. Moreover, there was video and audio on the Microsoft encyclopedia! Now a young student could do more than just read about Martin Luther King, Jr. He could watch part of the King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech right there on his computer! It was too cool. Unfortunately, I never really got to use it in my classroom. The first computers we had in our district didn't have CD-ROM drives on them. By the time we got around to replacing those computers, in the late 90's, the computers had CD-ROM drives but no speakers. And by the time we got around to replacing THOSE computers at the beginning of this century, Wikipedia and encarta online and other online encyclopedias had replaced the Encarta product as the most efficient ways of getting information. But I still always thought the Encarta CD-ROMs were a neat idea, and a nice bridge from the print encyclopedia to the larger world of the Internet.

All that said, they'll never have as soft a place in my heart as the Merit Students Encyclopedias that I had as a kid. In many ways, those were my version of the Internet when I was young. I used to browse the encyclopedias in pretty much the same way that I browse the Internet sometimes today.

My God! Could I be any more of a geek!

I read them until I wore out the poor things, and I even took them with me when I moved out of the house. I kept them in my classroom for years, and though they eventually became very outdated, I would still read them from time to time, and would allow my students to use them if what they were researching involved something where the scholarship hadn't changed much over the last forty years (something like William Shakespeare).

I don't have them anymore, though I know exactly where they are: They're all in the bottom of the well at Vent Haven Museum. I tossed them in there long, long ago.